A Beautiful College Journalist Has Discovered The Darkest Secret Of Human Trafficking. Now She Is About To Become Its Next Victim.
For Samantha Grayson life at prestigious Great Northern University outside of Chicago couldn't be any more perfect: the star reporter for The Daily Northern and in love with Tyler McManaway, the handsome All-American quarterback of the school's resurgent football team. Until a passing glimpse of a story concerning the baffling disappearance of five young women that terrorized Los Angeles a year earlier catches her attention, unknowingly leading Samantha on a path towards an unimaginable danger.
Samantha has no idea the disappearances are linked to a dark chapter in human history. Descendants of those involved in the African slave trade evolving the sordid enterprise into a wicked commerce far more vile and insidious. A shadowy cabal trafficking in female flesh, kidnapping unsuspecting young women to fill grim consignments worth millions for wealthy and powerful clients to satisfy barbarous and twisted desires. Now their most skilled Collector, an operative known for ruthless cunning, is in Chicago to acquire 'product' for his most profitable, and brutally sadistic, client. A man that if his depraved secret of violent blood lust comes to light will send political shock waves around the globe and threaten the fragile stability of the world's economy.
When a worried freshman seeks Samantha's assistance in locating her missing roommate, the investigation leads Samantha straight into a terrifying peril not only jeopardizing her life, but also those of her closest friends. As Samantha struggles to escape the seemingly hopeless situation and a cruel destiny guaranteeing a certain death, Tyler McManaway is thrust into a desperate life-and-death contest far removed from the playing field to rescue the woman he loves from the brutal clutches of evil men with malicious intentions before time runs out and Samantha Grayson vanishes forever as another helpless victim of The Trading Society.
Eric Martin is the pen name of this 1988 graduate of The University of Notre Dame where he worked as a news reporter on the staff of The Observer, the independent student newspaper. When not writing, he puts his degree to use selling running shoes at Fleet Feet Sports in Chicago where he also writes and edits copy for the store's website. He does not have an advanced degree in fiction writing, but has been blessed with a fertile, and some would say overactive, imagination with him since his early childhood growing up in Seneca Falls in Upstate New York. This is his debut novel under his pen name; expanding on a shorter serial work originally developed in a Yahoo story group in 1999. He lives in Homewood, Illinois, a suburb south of Chicago, with Cubbie, his rescue greyhound, and sometimes literary muse. Follow his thoughts on all things in the political and sporting world, along with other random thoughts, on twitter @ericmartinwrite
